Telkom SA joins First National Bank as the second company in this sponsorship class and gains local marketing rights to both the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ and the FIFA Confederations Cup, which will be held in South Africa in 2009.
The deal makes Telkom SA one of the largest and strategically important South African service companies directly involved in the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ operation. Telkom SA will be the main partner for fixed-line network infrastructure provisioning, offering significant value-in-kind services to support the broadcast of the event outside South Africa to an accumulated audience of more than 26 billion people around the globe.
Telkom SA will enable the interconnection of important event venues such as the ten stadiums, broadcast compounds, media centres, the international broadcast centre (IBC) and the FIFA and SALOC headquarters.
The significance of FIFA’s deal with Telkom SA is underlined by the statistics from the 2006 FIFA World Cup™, during which more than 21 terabytes of voice and data traffic were transferred over the event network by the 32 teams, FIFA officials, the local organising committee, media and other event operations partners. This translates to nearly eight years of continuous MP3 music. Stated differently, it is equivalent to the 24 million volumes of books, photographs, recordings and other information held at the world’s largest library, the United States Library of Congress.
